


Like A Storybook Story

by alexygalaxy



Series: Widojest Week 2019 [4]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Kissing, and some disgustingly cute couples nicknames, like a pretty hefty amount of kissing, like i wrote it and i want them to get a room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 13:40:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19769359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexygalaxy/pseuds/alexygalaxy
Summary: Jester and Caleb talk about their favorite childhood fairy tales, when they're not too busy being sappy with each other.





	Like A Storybook Story

**Author's Note:**

> hell yeah widojest week day 4: fairy tale
> 
> they're fully in love and dating in this one bc we don't have Nearly enough established relationship fics!!!!!! (not that i dont like them spending 8000 words thinking 'oh itll never happen, i dont deserve this' but sometimes i just fuckin want them to kiss u know?) but yeah this is really just a lot of kissing and snuggling with some ye olde fantasy fairy tale talk sprinkled in there. 
> 
> yes i did take the title from the princess bride song. what are u gonna do about it?
> 
> enjoy!!!

The door to their study creaks open and Caleb peeks his head in, small smile lifting his face as he catches sight of Jester. She’s lying across the couch, one leg draped haphazardly over the armrest and the other hanging off the side of the cushion, head no longer on the pillow she had propped up to lay on, elbows tucked into her sides as she strokes the orange cat curled up on her chest. 

She looks up then, turning enough to send Frumpkin leaping off her. A grin splits her face as she exclaims, “Hey! You’re back!” 

“Ja, liebling, I told you I would not be too long this time,” Caleb says, stepping fully into the room and pushing the door closed with his hip as he balances paper, ink, and a few books in his arms. He sets the pile down on a table before Jester can offer to help him, and grabs the novels off the top.

“Did you find anything good on your book hunt with Nott?” Jester asks, patting the couch next to her as she sits up to give Caleb space to sit with her. 

“Nothing useful, unfortunately. But,” he selects a smallish, yet very thick and  _ very _ musty leather-bound tome as he sinks into the couch next to her, “I did find this. I think you will like it. It is a collection of fairy tales, and it has got some wonderful drawings in it, see.”

He cracks the book open, and flips a couple pages, tilting the book towards Jester. She’s crawled across the sofa to rest her chin on him and wrap her arms lazily around his torso as she peeks over his shoulder. The page he settles on is a drawing of a masquerade ball. Dressed up guests dance across the page, the drawing seemingly focused on a dragonborn man twirling a dark-haired young woman wearing an extravagant gown. The ink used must have some magical essence to it, because the color is completely unfaded and even seems to shimmer despite the low light in the room. 

“Cal’b ‘ts beaut’ful,” Jester mumbles, the positioning of her chin on his shoulder jumbling her words slightly. 

“I knew you would think so, Blueberry.” He presses a kiss to her horn, before flipping through the pages, searching for more illustrations.

“Ooh, ooh, go back one! I saw a really pretty forest!” Jester bounces slightly, squeezing Caleb’s side as she does so. 

“Hm? Oh, ja,” Caleb answers, going back to the page in question. It's dark green, mostly, as it depicts a clearing in a dense forest. There’s a pool in the clearing, which glimmers again with enchanted ink. A deer leans down to drink from the pond. Wildflowers dust the edges of the page, adding pops of yellow, pink, and white to the otherwise earth-toned image. “That is very beautiful. Reminds me of the forest we had near my home in Blumenthal.”

“Really?” Jester asks Caleb’s neck, where she has more or less buried her face.

“Ja. The trees were very thick, just like this drawing. A little spooky. All green inside, no light.”

“Ooh, oh my gosh, that  _ is _ really spooky. Did kids go missing in there all the time, like in the fairy tales?” 

“Nein. Pets sometimes would, though.”

Jester gasps with exaggerated pain in her voice, pulling her head back so she can fake weep. “Noooooo! Not the little animals!”

“Jaaaaaa!” Caleb responds, the affirmation equally exaggerated. “You’ll have to keep a close eye on Nugget if I ever bring you back there.”

“Of  _ course _ I will, I’m a great pet owner, you know, Nugget loves me the most, and he would never run away if I told him not to.”

“Mm. You are right, Blueberry,” he hums, shifting out of Jester’s arms so he can lie all the way down on the couch.. “Except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” Jester asks as she scooches over, giving Caleb room to maneuver. 

“ _ I _ love you most.”

Jester crinkles her nose at that, giving Caleb a painfully fake scowl before sprawling atop his now mostly horizontal form. She finds the spot on his shoulder where she can rest her head without stabbing him with her horns. Her legs drop lazily around his, and she shoves her arms underneath his torso so that she’s hugging him again. 

“Alright,  _ Strawberry _ , I guess you’re right,” she concedes, pressing a kiss to his jaw before settling in and closing her eyes. Caleb sets his book on her shoulder blades and begins to thumb through it. 

As much as Jester loves him, and spending time with him, and laying on him, and as much as she knows he loves reading, her restlessness quickly gets the better of her. She begins to stir a little.

“Hey Caleb?” she mutters into his neck. 

“What is it, liebling?”

“What’s your favorite fairytale? Like, of all time. You know, the one you’d hear like, every night before you went to sleep as a kid.”

“Hmm, well - ”

“I think mine is  _ The Woman of the Sea _ ,” Jester adds before Caleb can finish his answer. 

“Is it?,” he asks, noting his page number before closing the novel and setting it on the floor. He tucks a loose strand of Jester’s hair behind her ear as she wriggles around, re-situating herself so that her arms create a chinrest across his rib cage. 

“Yeah, it is,” she starts excitedly, making eye contact with Caleb to ensure he’s engaged in her storytelling. “Ok, so, basically, it goes like this: 

“Once upon a time there lived the most beautiful mermaid ever, she was super gorgeous with like, super long hair and a super colorful tail and everything, and she was supposed to get married to another mermaid so they could, like, have mermaid babies or whatever. But she didn’t  _ want _ to get married to him, she wanted to go explore the human world. 

“And her mean Dad kept saying no, but one day she went to visit a sea witch, and she was like ‘Hey, yo, Miss Sea Witch, can you like, let me walk around on the beach for a little while’ and the witch was like ‘Yeah, I can totally do that, but I’m gonna need a payment’ and the mermaid is like ‘I don’t have anything to pay you with!’ and the sea witch is like ‘you can pay me with  _ your LIFE _ !’” 

Jester pulls one of her hands out from under her chin to wiggle menacingly with the last line, causing Caleb to chuckle. 

“Don’t laugh at me, Caleb, it’s super dramatic and scary when my momma tells it.”

“I believe you entirely. Keep going.” 

“Ok, so the witch is like ‘PAY ME WITH YOUR LIFE’ which basically means the mermaid has a week to live on land and unless she could come up with a huge sum of money by the end of the week, she would die, and the witch would get her soul for all of time.

“So she goes on land - oh and the witch gave her, like, legs and stuff - and she’s walking on the beach and she runs into this cute guy who turns out to be a prince, and the prince is all like ‘Oh my gosh, you are so pretty, you should come live in my castle’. So the mermaid goes to live in the castle with him and they spend all week together, and at the end of the week there’s a ball, and this is where it gets really good, ok, Caleb?”

He gives her a slight attentive nod.

“So they’re at the ball and this other girl shows up and the mermaid is all worried cause she’s also super pretty and is dancing with the prince all night, and then the prince comes to her on the very last dance, and they dance together, and she knows that she’s in love.

“And, now, in the original version, the prince tells her ‘I love you, but I’m engaged to this other girl, and we can never be married’ and the mermaid doesn’t get the money, and she goes back to the sea and dissolves into the ocean, and the sea witch takes her soul. But I think that version is stupid so I wrote my own, where the prince dances with her, and then he says ‘Oh, mermaid, I love you so much and I could never leave you’ and then the two of them steal a bunch of money from the royal vault and they pay off the sea witch and then they run away together and live happily ever after.”

“That version is much more fun, Blueberry.” Caleb grabs Jester’s hand as he speaks and threads his fingers through hers. “I see why you like it so much.”

“Mhm,” Jester answers. “The other one sucks. What kind of a sad world would it be without true love?”

“I hope to never find out,” Caleb says, giving Jester’s hand a squeeze. 

“Don’t worry, Strawberry. You won’t,” Jester assures him as she pushes forwards for a peck on the lips. Or two. Or three. She lets out a happy sigh as she settles back onto his chest, their held hands now dangling off the side of the couch and swinging slowly. 

“Let me see, uh, oh! I have a good one,” Caleb half-mutters. “I used to love this story when I was little.”

“Ooh, yes, tell me, tell me, tell me!”

“Getting to it, liebling.” He takes a second to push Jester’s hair out of her face again, letting his hand linger on her jaw as he pulls it back. “The story goes that there was a very poor couple who had one daughter, but shortly after the daughter was born, the mother got very ill. The father went to buy medicine for her from a local witch, but had no money, so he stole the medicine instead. When the witch found out, she agreed not to curse the man and his wife, but only if they gave her the baby.

“So, the witch took the baby to her home deep in the woods, and raised her as her own. But she did not want the baby to find out she was not her real mother, so she made the baby stay inside the house her whole life. Then, one day, when the girl was grown up, she was sitting by the window, looking out at the forest, and she saw a man ride by on a horse. 

“She rarely ever saw people out in the woods, so she called out to him. He came to her, and they began to talk. And they talked for hours and hours, and he told her all about the world outside of the forest. She said, ‘I would like to see the world outside’, but just then her mother heard them speaking, and came into yell at the girl. 

“She pushed the man away, but did not have time to shut the window, so the man heard when the witch threatened to lock the girl in her room as punishment. He waited outside the house for a few hours, and he saw the witch leave, at which point he snuck to the girl’s window. He could hear her crying, and he knocked on the window, and when she opened it she stopped crying immediately. He told he loved her and he wanted to show her the world, and she said she loved him and wanted to see it. So, he helped her out of the window and the two of them ran away together, to get married and live outside of the forest.”

“Wow,” Jester says. “That’s a really cute story. But also kind of weird. Like, they barely knew each other for a day before they ran off to get married.”

“In your story they only knew each other for a week,” Caleb retorts. 

Jester huffs.

“Do not fret yourself, liebling, I only joke. Besides, they are just stories. They are not meant to be like real life.”

“Yeah, that’s super true. Like what kind of mom would lock her kid away in the same building for like her whole life?”

“Jester- ” Caleb starts.

“Well, I mean technically, my momma kind of did that, but I got to leave sometimes and she had a better reason than the witch anyways.”

“Ja, I … suppose.”

“She did, Caleb!” Jester cries defensively. “Plus the most unrealistic part was the falling love anyways. It doesn’t happen like that.”

“That is very true, liebling,” Caleb answers, running his free hand over Jester’s shoulder. 

“Yeah, like, after I knew you for a week, all I thought about you," Jester comments and cocks her head to the side as she runs through the memories, "was that you needed to take a bath, like, really bad."

This earns a bark of laughter from Caleb, one that shakes his chest and the tiefling lying on top of it. She smiles at that, finally loosing her hand from Caleb’s so she can suspend herself above him with one arm and cup his face with the other. She brushes a thumb along his cheek bone. 

“You’re very clean and handsome now, though,” she clarifies, pressing another kiss to his lips.

“Oh, I am glad you think so, Blueberry.” 

“I do,” Jester assures, letting Caleb place a hand on her waist and draw her back down so she is laying flush against him again, her head back in its original position on his shoulder. 

“I do not know how long it took me to fall in love with you,” he says after a while.

“Three seconds, everybody loves me right away.”

“Quite possibly, but I think it took me several months to realize it.”

“Well, I guess,” Jester says to his collarbone before kissing it, “it was worth” and she kisses his jaw, ““the wait,” and finally stretches up to his mouth. 

“Oh, Blueberry, the wait nearly killed me.” Caleb runs his hand from her waist, up her back, and into her hair, pulling her back in for another kiss. 

“Mmm, sorry,” Jester mumbles, still halfway kissing him.

“Oh, nein, no. No apologies.”

“Alright, guess I just have to do this instead then,” she says, before bringing her lips back to Caleb’s. This time, she kisses him deep and long, with just a little bit of tongue for fun. 

Jester pulls back after a bit, leaning back to truly take in Caleb’s face. What she’d once seen as sharp and sallow bones are now soft, lit up with a wide smile and a tinge of crimson blush. His thin lips, once caught in a permanent frown, are now curled in a love-struck grin and a little swollen from the kisses Jester has already placed on them. His haunted eyes are transformed, now gleaming in that joyous way Jester loves so much, and is coming to see more and more often.

Gods, she loves him. She really, really, loves him. 

“I love you,” she tells him. “I really, really love you.”

“I really, really love you too.”

“I love you more than any fairy tale girl could, Strawberry. ‘Cause I’ve known you for way longer than a day or a week and I love you enough to know the things you like and the things you don’t. I love you enough to know what you’re thinking even if you don’t say it. I love you enough to know the punchline of your jokes before you even get there, but I still laugh ‘cause it’s funnier when you say it. I love you enough to tell when you’re sad or angry, even if you’re trying to not let it show, but I love it even more when you’re happy. I love you enough to run away with you right now, and I love you enough to know you don’t want to do that anymore. I love you enough for a million happily ever afters. I love you more than all the story girls combined.”

  
  


If Caleb was a lovesick fool before, he has no words for how he’s feeling now. He absolutely melts.

“Well then, Blueberry,” he whispers, guiding her lips back to his, “if you love me so much, why don’t you come down here and show me.”

Yeah. She shows him. 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading, comment or leave kudos if you like!! 
> 
> as always, feel free to hit me up at [cadykeus-clay](https://cadykeus-clay.tumblr.com) on tumblr!!!


End file.
